Sable

• 1. Introduction

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  The sable, Martes zibellina, is a small forest mammal, yet a wealthy 17th-century Russian diplomat once described it as "A beast that the Ancient Greeks and Romans called the Golden Fleece." That is a strange comparison for an animal that spends its twilight hours hunting hares and rodents through northern woods. Behind the remark lies a trade that reached the courts of kings and the tents of Mongol chieftains. How does such a creature live so quietly in thick forest? What made its coat the subject of such grand claims? How did one species shape tribute, borders and law? And how did it come back after hunting drove its numbers down?

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• 2. Twilight Hunter

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  Spruce, pine, larch, Siberian cedar and birch crowd the forests where sables make their homes, in low valleys and mountain country alike. The animal digs its burrows near riverbanks and in the thickest stretches of woodland. Many are tucked among tree roots, which helps keep them secure. Dens are well hidden and lined with grass and shed fur. Some are only temporary, especially in winter. The sable climbs cliffs and trees with ease. It does most of its hunting at twilight, and only in the mating season does it become more active by day.

  Hearing and smell guide the hunt. The sable has an acute sense of hearing, and it marks its ground with scent from glands on its abdomen.

  Summer finds the sable eating mountain hares and other small mammals in large numbers. Winter, with its frost and snow, shifts the menu to wild berries, rodents, hares and even small musk deer. Stoats, small weasels and birds also end up as prey. Sometimes a sable follows the tracks of wolves and bears and feeds on what they leave behind. It eats slugs too, rubbing them on the ground first to strip away their mucus. Now and then it catches fish with its front paws.

  When food is scarce, the sable travels considerable distances to find more. Larger animals hunt it in turn, among them wolves, foxes, wolverines, tigers, lynxes, eagles and large owls. Against that list, the sable keeps a reproductive trick that stretches across most of a year.

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• 3. Delayed Pregnancy

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  Courting males dig shallow grooves in the snow, each about a metre long and often marked with urine. Courting sables also run, jump and "rumble" like cats, and rival males fight each other violently for females. Mating runs from June to the 15th of August, though the dates shift from region to region. A single mating can last as long as eight hours.

  The strange part comes afterward. The fertilised egg, called a blastocyst, does not attach to the wall of the uterus. Implantation happens eight months later. Gestation lasts 245 to 298 days, yet the embryo needs only 25 to 30 days to develop.

  Mothers give birth in tree hollows, in nests built of moss, leaves and dried grass. A litter can hold anywhere from one to seven young, though two or three is most common. Fathers help by defending territory and bringing food.

  Newborns arrive with closed eyes and only a very thin layer of hair. They open their eyes between 30 and 36 days and leave the nest shortly afterward. At seven weeks they are weaned and fed regurgitated food. Sexual maturity comes at two years. Sables have been reported to live up to eighteen years in the wild and up to twenty two years on fur farms. Those same farms sometimes arrange a pairing that nature allows in only a few places.

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• 4. Cousins and Hybrids

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  Where the sable shares the Ural Mountains with the European pine marten, the two species sometimes interbreed. Fur farmers have also encouraged the pairing on purpose. The offspring is called a kidus. It is slightly smaller than a pure sable, with coarser fur, similar markings and a long bushy tail. Kiduses are typically sterile. Even so, one female kidus is on record as breeding successfully with a male pine marten.

  Telling the parent species apart takes a careful eye. Sables greatly resemble pine martens in size and appearance, but they have longer ears, more elongated heads and proportionately shorter tails. The sable skull is larger and sturdier, with more strongly arched cheekbones.

  Colour runs from light to dark brown, lighter underneath and darker on the back and legs. A patch on the throat may be gray, white or pale yellow. Japanese sables stand out for the black markings on their legs and feet. The fur is softer and silkier than that of American martens, and the winter coat is longer and more luxurious than the summer one.

  The seventeen subspecies listed by Mammal Species of the World are not the final word. Other recent scholarly sources count anything from seven to thirty. That silky winter coat, more than any skull measurement, would decide the animal's fate.

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• 5. Fur of Kings

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  The Russian word sobol' and the Polish soból became the German Zobel and the Dutch sabel as the early medieval fur trade carried the name westward. The French, Spanish, Finnish and Portuguese words descend instead from the Italian zibellino. English took its form from Old French sable or saible. The name itself traveled with the skins.

  What buyers prized was texture. Sable fur stays smooth in every direction it is stroked, while the fur of other animals feels rough against the grain. Russian trappers typically skinned sables through the mouth, without cutting the body, and kept the feet attached to save as much fur as possible. Byzantine priests wore sable for their rituals.

  In England, the Bishop of Lincoln presented Henry I with a wreath of black sable, priced at 100 pounds, a considerable sum at the time. Emperor Charles V once sent Henry VIII five sets of sable worth 400 pounds. Henry later decreed that only nobles above the rank of viscount could wear it. Even the civic robes of the Lord Mayor and Corporation of London, worn on State occasions, were trimmed with sable.

  The Secret History of the Mongols tells how Genghis Khan married his first wife, Börte Ujin. Her parents gave his mother, Hoelun, a coat of sable furs, a noble gift that was also practical. Soon afterward, the young Shigi Qutuqu was found wandering a destroyed Tatar camp. His sable-lined silk jerkin showed that he was of noble birth. The finest skins of all, in time, came from Irkutsk and Kamchatka.

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• 6. Empire of Sables

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  Ivan Grozny once demanded an annual tribute of 30,000 sable pelts from the newly conquered Kazan Tatars. They never sent more than a thousand. Russia, tied up in wars with Sweden and Poland, could not enforce the demand. The hunger for sables ran deeper than that single order, because the Russian conquest of Siberia was largely spurred by the animals living there.

  According to Atkinson's Travels in Asiatic Russia, Barguzin, on Lake Baikal, was famed for its sables. The fur of that population is a deep jet black with white-tipped hair. Hunters sometimes demanded eighty to ninety dollars for a single skin. In 1916, the Barguzin Nature Reserve became the first nature reserve in the Russian Empire, created precisely to preserve and increase the Barguzin sable.

  Sable stayed the most favoured fur in Russia until sea otters were discovered on the Kamchatka peninsula. Their fur was considered even more valuable. Russian nobles coveted sable so strongly that very few skins ever turned up outside the empire. Some were privately obtained by Jewish traders, who brought them every year to the Leipzig fair. Sable hunting was sometimes a job handed to convicts exiled to Siberia.

  Imperial Russian fur companies produced 25,000 skins a year, and nearly ninety percent were exported to France and Germany. As with minks and other martens, sables were commonly caught in steel traps.

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• 7. Return to the Forest

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  Hunting grew so intense in Russia during the 19th and early 20th centuries that numbers fell severely. In 1935 the authorities imposed a five-year ban on sable hunting. A licensed hunt limited to winter followed. Together with the rise of sable farms, these limits let the species recolonise much of its former range and reach healthy numbers.

  Russia's modern sable map is largely man-made. Mass re-introductions involving 19,000 animals between 1940 and 1965 shaped its distribution there. The range now reaches north to the tree line. Southward it extends to 55-60 degrees latitude in western Siberia and 42 degrees in the mountains of eastern Asia. The sable also occurs on Sakhalin.

  In Mongolia, sables live in the Altai Mountains and in the forests around Lake Hovsgol. Those forests are contiguous with the Transbaikal boreal forest, the source of the most valuable pelts. In China, the sable occurs in a limited area of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. In the northeast it is now limited to the Greater Khingan Range, and in eastern Heilongjiang it persists in the Lesser Khingan Range. It is also found on Hokkaido and on the Korean peninsula. Pelts from Transbaikal remain the most prized, which keeps commercial pressure on the animal.

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• 8. Sable Today

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  Under the Soviet Union, Old Believer communities were allowed to keep their traditional way of life on one condition. They had to hand over every sable skin they produced.

  The dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s brought a rise in hunting and poaching. Wild-caught Russian furs are considered the most luxurious and command the highest prices on the international market, which helps explain the surge.

  The IUCN Red List now gives the species no special conservation status, rating it Least Concern. The isolated Japanese subspecies, M. zibellina brachyurus, is listed as data-deficient, meaning too little is known to judge its health.

  Sable fur remains highly valued. It decorates collars, sleeves, hems and hats, among them the shtreimel. Artists' brushes sold as kolinsky sable-hair, used for watercolour and oil painting, are not made from sable at all. Their hair comes from the Siberian weasel.

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